AuthorTopic: Do boot floppies still exist? (Read 3375 times)

I never thought I'd ever need a boot floppy again, but due to some seriously bad juju (and I can't explain it any better than that) booting from the hard disk and from the CD have both disappeared from my bios, leaving me only booting from a diskette as an option. How can I get a boot floppy (I have a debian computer that still runs) and by the way can anybody tell me what the hell just happened?

You can use your Debian computer to install Smart Boot Manager to a floppy. It should give you a list of the drives it sees and try to boot from them. Of course, if Bigpaws' guess is correct, it won't see anything but the floppy drive.

Look around in BIOS, make sure everything is enabled. You may try the "load defaults" option. Maybe there is a "detect IDE" entry. Or, maybe it's broke.

My solution was to install Slackware 11.0, which as far as I can tell, is the last slackware release to still use boot floppies. In the course of the install, I discovered that one of my hard drives wasn't reading. I replaced it, and that ended the problem. I don't know what that would have to do with finding the CD drive in the bios, but there it is.

It was the hard drive holding the / (root) partition, not the one holding my special data, a lousy 20 GB, so it was no big loss. I replaced it with an old 10 GB hard drive, which holds the / partition just as well as the 20 GB.